The Interplanetary Migration
In the distant past (from our now) or the near present (from your now), the Earth and its inhabitants were at something of a crucial impasse. When the looming environmental crisis suddenly stopped looming, survival became a daily uncertainty for an increasing proportion of an endleslly growing human population. Equatorial regions became all but uninhabitable, climates oscillated through violent extremes, and in a process of mirroring that would have been poetic were it not so panic-inducing, the political and social centre became increasingly unexpoundable, and otherwise humble work-a-dayers were overtaken in a cross-section of emphatic nationalist rage and impassioned humanitarianism. Crucially though, neither sea creature nor butcher, baker or candlestick maker was at any great pains to maintain the status quo, so what had once been a lucrative and well funded network of plausible deniability was finally revealed to be a false economy, and serious plans to establish interstellar colonies gained serious financial and political support. It was a common trope of the time to speak of billionaire's increasing power and influence with a note of prophetic doom. But similarly oversaturated was a consignment to a kind of "If you can't beat them, join them" attitude; and you really couldn't beat them. Most people were distracted while, in little more than a decade, our robots took Mars. The human race was like a child, mesmerised by an afternoon movie, loping bleary-eyed from the cinema to find night has fallen and Mars had become the first massive industrialised and privately operated intergalactic export economy. Yes, like cosmological squatters, we arrived and set up shop without a murmur. So, it was with a little more clout this time that Dawson Major, self proclaimed space king and Mars project figurehead, made his appeal to the markets selling a plan to colonise a planet in a solar system a few doors down from our little sun. An atmospheric marble in the sky just waiting to be plucked by a human diaspora - fully furnished, excellent amenities. His competitors, as competitors tend to, swiftly followed suit. And humanity looked on at the birth of a space race 2.0, almost laughably distant from the reality of their strained and impoverished times, as the world ticked over, a machine whirring noisily into its twilight years, desparately in need of repair, tacked together lazily by super corporations whose CEOs had their eyes now firmly set on the stars. Crowds gathered to watch fleets of ships carrying immensely complex robotic workers, networked into self sustaining AI units, as they set off on a decades long journey to what would become a new home for their human creators. And it was a stunning display. For those who took interest in the details, the propulsion with which humanity had launched itself into a new technoligcal apex was a truly marvellous thing. There really were some clever people down there. Of that, at least, there can be no doubt. As our mechanical cosmic contractors soldiered on with what was, on anyone's estimation, a big job, the lifetime's long project was much derided as an unspeakable display of arrogance in a world riddled with crises, from the deathly scarce supply of clean water to nigh on irrepairable global financial infrastructure. A vanity project for modern day pharoahs who had somehow persisted into their 13th and 14th decades in living form. But history tends not be told by the downtrodden, and the humans left behind would learn that lesson again, and again, and again, as the intergalactic colonisation would soon begin. But let us not look back on our ancestors too cynically, future humans. Whatever the motivation that lies behind the weaving of our times, it was a hodge podge group of pioneering scientists and dreamers who first stepped out into their new homes - our new planets. Sure, they were hastily followed by international envoys staking claim to planetary authorities on stringently defined terms, lest anything new threaten to spontaneously assert itself, and yes, the whole operation was not without its losers. But among the new arrivals, like any great human migration, was hope- hope that maybe, just maybe, something great might be made here. That maybe all along, destiny was just a few lightyears away... = >>> Next: Chapter Two: The Posthuman Movement = Category:History Category:Universe